En el Nombre del Cielo

How in heaven’s name can I write anything when I seem to be constantly writing to you.


Anne Sexton

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.





Erich Fromm // The Art of Loving

65

One day, whether you are 14, 28 or 65, you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find - is they are not always with whom we spend our lives.


Beau Taplin // Hunting Season

Echizo de Tinta

Fire and water,… don’t really mix. You could say they’re incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.




Cornelia Funke // Inkspell

La Douleur Exquise

— (idiom) A French, untranslatable phrase, describing the heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have. To say this phrase is synonymous with unrequited love limits its beauty. Unrequited love describes a relationship state, but not a state of mind. Unrequited love encompasses the lover who isn’t corresponding, as well as the lover who desires. La douleur exquise evokes the emotional heartache, specifically, of being the one whose love is unreciprocated.

 

Y Nadie se le Aproxima

19 May. He feels more deserted with a second person than when alone. If he is together with someone, this second person reaches out for him and he is helplessly delivered into his hand. If he is alone, all mankind reaches out for him – but the innumerable outstretched arms become entangled with one another and no one reaches to him.

Franz Kafka’s diary entry of 19 May 1922. From The Diaries of Franz Kafka.” Schocken Books. Translation by Martin Greenberg.

Bestial

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”



Stephen Crane // 1895

All those ships that never sailed
The ones with their seacocks open
That were scuttled in their stalls...
Today I bring them back
Huge and intransitory
And let them sail
Forever



Bob Kaufman

Genésico

Vivir es darse, perpetuarse, y perpetuarse y darse es morir. Acaso el supremo deleite del engendrar no es sino un anticipado gustar de la muerte, el desgarramiento de la propia esencia vital. Nos unimos a otro, pero es para partirnos; ese más íntimo abrazo no es sino un más íntimo desgrarramiento. En su fondo, el deleite amoroso sexual, el espasmo genésico, es una sensación de resurrección, de resucitar en otro, porque sólo en otros podemos resucitar para perpetuarnos.


El sentimiento trágico de la vida // Miguel de Unamuno

Sus Amantes y Mi Carta a Mano

Inward

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.


— Sylvia Plath

Saudade

“saudade”

— (noun) A Portuguese, untranslatable word romanticizing nostalgia in its purest form. This beautiful feeling captures the yearning for someone or something that you love, which is now lost. It is a melancholic longing. Saudade’s pronunciation varies according to the speaker and country, which only adds to its sincerity and vulnerability.

Acto

Her concise speaking style was strangely persuasive. From every word that came to her lips, he felt a precise, wedge-like thrust. He still could not tell though, how seriously he should take her. There was something out of the ordinary about her, a screw slightly loose. It was an inborn quality, perhaps. He might be in the presence of an authentic talent in its most natural form, or it could all be an act.



-  Haruki Murakami

Irremarcable

Mara tells me that he was
no one special. Okay.
I believe her.
He was no one special.
Unremarkable, even.
A newspaper man with coffee
breath and ugly sneakers.
Mara tells me to let go.

But I waited for him, Mara.
I ate the scraps of his heart like
a starving dog under the dinner
table.
I slept at his feet and then by the
door when he was too far away.


I dreamt of coffee. I brought
the newspaper in every morning.

He was no one special, but it
didn’t matter, Mara,
because I kissed his stained teeth.
I brushed his unremarkable hair,
rested my head on his soft,
unremarkable stomach.

There was no hunger like my
hunger, Mara.
No man like my plain man.
No torch like my torch.

"

Caitlyn Siehl, Unremarkable (via alonesomes)

Titus

When I saw the couple get into the taxicab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her.



Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant by man-womanly, and conversely by woman-manly, by pausing and looking at a book or two.

Coleridge … meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind… And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before… No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own…

Castigado

Here I go again,
talking myself up the side of another
treacherous mountain.
I work my way up.

And then you come through,
blowing my progress down with your
turbulent zephyr.
You take me back down.

I fumble and fall,
tumbling towards the ground of the
tentative bottom.
I fracture the ground.

And it’s you who comes,
saving me from dropping beneath by
throwing yourself in.
You prevent the drop.

But you can’t go on,
pulling me off the endless sea of cliffs
time and time again.
We need for this end.

We must leave the heights,
flying to the ground below the cloud’s
triggering descent.
We meet solid ground.



Sarah Marie Pardy // Grounded